place of brakesman at the Dolly Pit, Black Callerton, with wages varying from seventeen and sixpence to a pound a week. But wheat then cost nearly six pounds the quarter.

use.

But there was another kind of knowledge necessary. At the age of eighteen he could not read; he could not write his name. His father had been too poor to afford any schooling to the children. He was then getting his friend Coe to teach him the mystery of braking, that he might, when opportunity occurred, advance to the post of brakesman, next above that which he held. He became curious also to know definitely something about the famous engines that were in those days planned by Watt and Bolton. The desire for knowledge taught him the necessity of learning to read books.

The brave young man resolved, therefore, to learn his letters and make potbooks at a night-school among a few colliers' sons, who paid three pence a week each to a poor teacher at Welbottle. At the age of nineteen he could write his name. A night-school was set up by a Scotchman within a few minutes' walk of Jolly's Close; and to this George Stephenson removed himself. The Scotchman had much credit for his mastery of arithmetic. He knew as far as reduction. George fastened upon arithmetic with an especial zeal, and was more apt than any other pupil for the study. In no very long time he had worked out all that could be yielded to him by the dominie. While thus engaged the young man was getting lessons from his friend Coe in braking, and, with Coe's help, persisting in them against dogged opposition from some of the old hands. At the age of twenty, being perfectly steady and trust

Fanny Henderson, a pretty servant in a neighboring farm-house, sweet-tempered, sensible, and good. He once had shoes of hers to mend, and as he carried them to her one Sunday evening, with a friend. he could not help pulling them out of his pocket every now and then to admire them because they were hers, and to bid his companion observe what a capital job he had made of them.

George Stephenson still enjoyed exercise in feats of agility and strength; still spent a part of each idle afternoon on the pay Saturday in taking his engine to pieces; cleaning it and pondering over the uses and values of its parts. He was a model workman in the eyes of his employers; never missing a day's wages through idleness or indiscretion; spending none of his evenings in public houses, avoiding the dog-fights, and cock-fights, and man-fights in which pitmen delighted. Once, indeed, being insulted by Ned Nelson, the bully of the pit, young Stephenson disdained to quail before him, though he was a great fighter, and a man with whom it was considered dangerous to quarrel. Nelson challenged him to a pitched battle, and the challenge was accepted. Everybody said Stephenson would be killed. The young men and boys came round him with awe to ask whether it was true that he was goin' to feight Nelson." "Ay," he said, fear for me; I'll feight him." Nelson went off work to go into training. Stephenson worked on as usual; went from a day's labor to the field of battle, and, on the appointed evening, and with his strong

66

66

never

muscle and hard bone, put down the bully, as he never for a moment doubted that he would.

As a brakesman George Stephenson had been removed to Willington Ballast Quay, when, at the age of twenty-one, he signed his name in the register of Newburn Church as the husband of Fanny Henderson; and, seating her beside him on a pillion upon a stout farm-horse borrowed from her sister's master, with the sister as bridesmaid and a friend as bridesman, he went first to his father and mother, who were growing old, and struggling against poverty in Jolly's Close, and, having paid his duty as a son to them, jolted across country and through the streets of Newcastle, upon a ride homeward of fifteen miles. An upper room in a small cottage at Willington Quay was the home to which George took his bride. Thirteen months afterward, his only son, Robert, was born there. The exercise of his mechanical skill, prompted sometimes by bold speculations of his own, amused the young husband, and the wife doubtless, of an evening. He was at work on the problem of perpetual motion. He had acquired reputation as a shoemaker. Accident gave rise to a yet more profitable exercise of ingenuity. Alarm of a chimney on fire caused his room to be one day flooded with soot and water by good-natured friends. His most valuable piece of furniture, the clock, was seriously injured. He could not afford to send it to a clock-maker, and resolved to try his own hand on the works; took them to pieces, studied them, and so put them together as to cure his clock in a way marvelous to all the village. He was soon asked to cure a neighbor's clock, and gradually made his title good to great fame as a clock-curer throughout the district.

After having lived three years as brakesman at Willington Quay, George Stephenson removed to Killingworth, where he was made brakesman at the West Moor Colliery. From the high ground of Killingworth the spires of Newcastle, seven miles distant, are visible, weather and smoke permitting. At Killingworth, when they had been but two or three years married, George Stephenson's wife, Fanny, died. Soon after her death, leaving his little boy in charge of a neighbor, he marched on foot into Scotland; for he

had been invited by the owners of a colliery near Montrose to superintend the working of one of Bolton and Watt's engines. For this work he received rather high wages; and after a year's absence he marched back again, on foot, to Killingworth, with twenty-eight pounds in his pocket. During his absence a bad accident had happened to his father. The steam-blast had been inadvertently let in upon him when he was inside an engine. It struck him in the face, and blinded him for the remainder of his life. George coming home from Scotland, paid the old man's debts, removed his parents to a comfortable cottage near his own place of work at Killingworth, for he was again taken on as brakesman at the West Moor Pit, and worked for them during the remainder of their lives. At this time there were distress and riot among laborers. George was drawn for the militia, and spent the remainder of his savings on the payment of a substitute. He was so much disabled in fortune that he thought of emigrating to America, as one of his sisters was then doing in company with her husband, but he could not raise money enough to take him out of it. To a friend he afterward said of his sorrow at this time: "You know the road from my house at the West Moor to Killingworth. I remember, when I went along that road, I wept bitterly, for I knew not where my lot would be cast."

It was a slight advance in independence, although no advance in fortune, when Stephenson, at the age of twenty-seven, joined two other brakesmen in taking a small contract under the lesses for braking the engines at the West Moor pit. The profits did not always bring him in a pound a week. His little son, Robert, was growing up, and he was bent on giving him what he himself had lacked-the utmost attainable benefit of education in his boyhood. Therefore George spent his nights in mending clocks and watches for his neighbors, mended and made shoes, cut out lasts, even cut out the pitmen's clothes for their wives to make up, and worked at their embroidery. He turned every spare minute to account, and so wrung, from a stubborn fortune, power to give the first rudiments of education to his son.

At last there came a day when all the cleaning and dissecting of his engines

turned to profit, and the clock-doctor won the more important character of enginedoctor. He had on various occasions suggested to the owners small contrivances which had saved wear and tear of material, or otherwise improved the working of his pit. When he was twenty-nine years old a new pit was sunk at Killingworth, now known as the Killingworth High Pit, over which a Newcomen engine was fixed for the purpose of pumping water from the shaft. For some reason the engine failed; as one of the workmen engaged on it tells the case," She couldn't keep her jack-head in water; all the engine-men in the neighborhood were tried, as well as Crowther of the Ouseburn, but they were clean bet." The engine pumped to no purpose for nearly twelve months. Stephenson had observed, when he saw it built, that if there was much water in the mine that engine wouldn't keep it under, but to the opinion of a common brakesman no heed had been paid. He used often to inquire as to "how she was getting on," and the answer always was, that the men were still drowned out. One Saturday afternoon George went to the High Pit, and made a close examination of the whole machine. Kit Heppel, sinker at the pit, said to him when he had done:

"Weel, George, what do you mak' o' her? Do you think you could do anything to improve her?"

"Man," said George, "I could alter her and make her draw. In a week's time from this I could send you to the bottom."

The conversation was reported to Ralph Dods, the head viewer. George was known to be an ingenious and determined fellow, and, as Dods said, "the engineers hereabouts are all bet." The brakesman, therefore, was at once allowed to try his skill; he could not make matters worse than they were, and he might mend them. He was set to work at once, picked his own men to carry out the alterations he thought necessary, took the whole engine to pieces, reconstructed it, and really did, in a week's time after his talk with Heppel, clear the pit of water. This achievement brought him fame as a pump-curer. Dods made him a present of ten pounds, and he was appointed engine-man on good wages at the pit he had redeemed, until the work of sinking was completed. The job lasted about a year. Thus, at the age of thirty, Stephenson

had begun to find his way across the borders of the engineer's profession. To all the wheezy engines in the neighborhood he was called in as a professional adviser. The regular men called him a quack; but the quack perfectly understood the constitution of an engine, and worked miracles of healing. One day, as he passed a drowned quarry, on his way from work, at which a windmill worked an inefficient pump, he told the men "he would set up for them an engine no bigger than a kailpot that would clear them out in a week." And he fulfilled his promise.

A year after his triumph at the High Pit the engine-wright at Killingworth was killed by an accident, and George Stephenson, on Mr. Dods's recommendation, was promoted to his place by the lessees. He was appointed engine-wright to the colliery at a salary of one hundred pounds a year.

At this time of his life Stephenson was associating with John Wigham, a farmer's son, who understood the rule of three, who had acquired some little knowledge of chemistry and natural philosophy, and who possessed a volume of Ferguson's lectures on Mechanics. With John Wigham Stephenson spent many leisure hours in study and experiment, learning all John could teach, and able to teach not a little out of his own thoughts in exchange for the result of John's reading. George Stephenson, at the age of thirty-three, had saved a hundred guineas; and his son Robert, then taken from a village school, was sent to Bruce's academy, at Newcastle.

The father had built with his own hand three rooms and an oven, in addition to the one room and a garret up a step-ladder that had been taken for his home at Killingworth. He had a little garden, in which he devoted part of his energy to the growth of monster leeks and cabbages. In the garden was a mechanical scarecrow of his own invention. The garden door was fastened by a lock of his contrivance, that none but himself could open. The house was a curiosity-shop of models and mechanical ideas. He amused people with a lamp that would burn under water, attached an alarm to the watchmen's clock, and showed women how to make a smoke-jack rock the baby's cradle. He was full of vigorous life. Kit Heppel one day challenged him to leap from the

top of one high wall to the top of another, there being a deep gap between. To his dismay he was taken at his word instantly. Stephenson cleared the eleven feet at a bound, exactly measuring his distance.

As engine-wright Stephenson had opportunities of carrying still further his study of the engine, as well as of turning to account the knowledge he already possessed. His ingenuity soon caused a reduction of the number of horses employed in the colliery from a hundred to fifteen or sixteen; and he had access not only to the mine at Killingworth, but to all collieries belonging to Lord Ravensworth and his partners, a firm that had been named the Grand Allies. The locomotive engine was then known to the world as a new toy, curious and costly. Stepenson had a perception of what might be done with it, and was beginning to make it the subject of his thoughts. From the ducation of his son, Robert, he was now deriving knowledge for himself. The father entered him as a member of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Institution, and toiled with him over books of science borrowed from its library. Mechanical plans he read at sight, never requiring to refer to the description; "a good plan," | he said, "should always explain itself." One of the secretaries of the Newcastle Institution watched with lively interest the studies of both father and son, and helped them freely to the use of books and instruments, while he assisted their endeavors with his counsels.

George Stephenson was thirty-two years old, and, however little he may by that time have achieved, one sees that he had accumulated in himself a store of power that would inevitably carry him on, upon his own plan of inch by inch advance, to new successes. Various experiments had been made with the new locomotive engines. One had been tried upon the Wylam tram-road, which went by the cottage in which Stephenson was born. George Stephenson brooded upon the subject, watched their failures, worked at the theory of their construction, and made it his business to see one. He felt his way to the manufacture of a better engine, and proceeded to bring the subject under the notice of the lessees of the colliery. He had acquired reputation not only as an ingenious, but as a safe and prudent man. He had instituted already

many improvements in the collieries. Lord Ravensworth, the principal partner, therefore authorized him to fulfill his wish; and with the greatest difficulty making workmen of some of the colliery hands, and having the colliery blacksmith for his head assistant, he built his first locomotive in the workshops at Westmoor, and called it "My Lord." It was the first engine constructed with smooth wheels; for Stephenson never admitted the prevailing notion that contrivances were necessary to secure adhesion. "My Lord" was called "Blucher" by the people round about. It was first placed on the Killingworth Railway on the twenty-fifth of July, 1814, and, though a cumbrous machine, was the most successful that had, up to that date, been constructed.

At the end of a year it was found that the work done by Blucher cost about as much as the same work would have cost if done by horses. Then it occurred to Stephenson to turn the steam-pipe into the chimney, and carry the smoke up with the draught of a steam-blast. That would add to the intensity of the fire and to the rapidity with which steam could be generated. The power of the engine was, by this expedient, doubled.

At about the same time some frightful accidents, caused by explosion in the pits of his district, set Stephenson to exercise his ingenuity for the discovery of a miner's safety lamp. By a mechanical theory of his own, tested by experiments made boldly at the peril of his life, he arrived at the construction of a lamp less simple, though perhaps safer, than that of Sir Humphrey Davy, and with the same method of defense. The practical man and the philosopher worked independently in the same year on the same problem. Stephenson's solution was arrived at a few weeks earlier than Davy's, and upon this fact a great controversy afterward was founded. One material result of it was, that Stephenson eventually received as public testimonial a thousand pounds, which he used later in life as capital for the founding at Newcastle of his famous locomotive factory. At the Killingworth pits the "Geordy" safety lamp is still in use, being there, of course, considered to be better than the Davy.

Locomotives had been used only on the tram-roads of the collieries, and by the time when Stephenson built his second

engine were generally abandoned as failures. Stephenson alone stayed in the field, and did not care who said that there would be at Killingworth "a terrible blow-up some day." He had already made up his mind that the perfection of a traveling engine would be half lost if it did not run on a perfected rail. Engine and rail he spoke of, even then, as "man and wife," and his contrivances for the improvement of the locomotive always went hand in hand with his contrivances for the improvement of the road on which it

ran.

We need not follow the mechanical details. In his work at the rail and engine he made progress in his own way, inch by inch; every new locomotive built by him contained improvements on its predecessor; every time he laid down a fresh rail he added some new element of strength and firmness to it. The Killingworth Colliery Railway was the seed from which sprang the whole European, and now more than European, system of railway intercourse. While systems and theories rose and fell round about, George Stephenson kept his little line in working order, made it pay, and slowly advanced in the improvement of the rails and engines used upon it. When it had been five years at work the owners of the Hetton Colliery, in the county of Durham, invited Stephenson to act as engineer for them in laying down an equally efficient and much longer line. Its length was to be eight miles, and it would cross one of the highest hills in the district; Stephenson put his locomotive on the level ground, worked the inclines with stationary engines, showed how full wagons descending an incline might be used as a power for the drawing up of empty ones, and in three years completed successfully a most interesting and novel series of works.

In those days there was talk of railroads to be worked by horse-power, or any better power, if better there were; but at any rate level roads laid down with rails for the facility of traffic were projected between Stockton and Darlington, between Liverpool and Manchester, and between other places.

The Killingworth Railway was seven years old, the Hetton line then being in course of construction. "George Stephenson was forty years old, when one day," writes Mr. Smiles, "about the end of the year 1821, two strangers knocked Vol. XI.-33

at the door of Mr. Pease's house in Darlington, (Mr. Pease was the head promoter of the railway between Darlington and Stockton,) and the message was brought to him that some persons from Killingworth wanted to speak with him. They were invited in; on which one of the visitors introduced himself as Nicholas Wood, viewer at Killingworth, and then, turning to his companion, he introduced him as George Stephenson, of the same place." George had also a letter of introduction from the manager at Killingworth, and came as a person who had had experience in the laying out of railways, to offer his services. He had walked to Darlington, with here and there a lift upon a coach, to see whether he could not get for his locomotive a fair trial, and for himself a step of advancement in life upon Mr. Pease's line. He told his wish in the strong Northumbrian dialect of his district; as for himself, he said, he was "only the engine-wright at Killingworth; that's what he was."

Mr. Pease liked him, told him his plans, which were all founded on the use of horse-power, he being satisfied "that a horse upon an iron road would draw ten tons for one on a common road, and that before long the railway would become the King's Highway." Stephenson boldly declared that his locomotive was worth fifty horses, and that moving engines would in course of time supersede all horse power upon railroads. "Come over," he said, "to Killingworth, and see what my Blucher can do; seeing is believing, sir." Mr. Pease went, saw, and believed. Stephenson was appointed engineer to the company, at a salary of three hundred a year. The Darlington line was constructed in accordance with his survey. His traveling engine ran upon it for the first time on the twenty-seventh of September, 1825, in sight of an immense concourse of people, and attained, in some parts of its course, a speed, then unexampled, of twelve miles an hour. When Stephenson afterward became a famous man he forgot none of his old friends. He visited even poor cottagers who had done a kindness to him. Mr. Pease will transmit to his descendants a gold watch, inscribed, "Esteem and gratitude; from George Stephenson to Edward Pease."

It was while the Stockton and Darlington line was in progress that George Ste